[pylucene-dev] About compiling with gcc 4.2

[Andi Vajda]

On Thu, 23 Nov 2006, Greg Kuperberg wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 23, 2006 at 10:44:12AM -0800, Andi Vajda wrote:
>> In any case, it's not that hard to build yourself, it takes a few hours
>> depending on the speed of your system.
>
> I have to say that a few hours is not a very good standard for
> installing software such as PyLucene.  I am used installing software
> in a few minutes.  When I can't use yum, apt-get, or rpm, I am used to
> the three-line installation procedure, "configure; make; make install".
> Indeed, a configuration script is an important intermediate step that
> makes it easier for other people to make RPM packages and Debian packages.
> I have been using Unix for 20 years, admittedly more as a user than
> as a developer, and I have never been very happy with hand-configuring
> Makefiles.

Would you like to contribute a configure script ?

> Moreover, in this case I depend on PyLucene for a project that I may
> want to "sell" to other people.  Part of the sell is going to be that
> it isn't too hard for them to install.
>
> PyLucene is an important project.  It is a bridge between Python,
> which is monumentally important, and Lucene, which is also important.
> When PyLucene works, it works really well, because Lucene is more
> complete and more scalable than many alternatives.  PyLucene is also
> faster than Lucene itself.  That said, I think that the difficult of
> installing PyLucene, and maybe also the haphazard documentation, are
> the main shortcomings of the project right now.  I think that you could
> multiply your user base by 10 if you concentrated on documentation and
> installation for a while.

Patches and contributions are welcome. The main challenge with installing 
PyLucene is getting the gcj story straight. Like PyLucene, gcj is an open 
source project [1] and could use help on many platforms. It is a rather 
bleeding edge work in progress with very uneven platform-specific support.

As for documentation, the Java Lucene documentation [2] is the basis for the 
PyLucene documentation. All exceptions are listed in PyLucene's README [3].
Again, if something in the PyLucene documentation is wrong or misleading, 
contributions, corrections and patches are welcome.

The "Lucene in Action" book [4] is also a great source of documentation and 
samples for using Lucene. Almost all samples from this book were ported to 
python and PyLucene [5].

> If OSAF has other priorities for PyLucene or for your time otherwise,
> then you have every right to point that out.

PyLucene is indeed only a small part of my regular day job at OSAF. In 
addition to PyLucene, I also do PyICU [6] and both these projects fill some 
specific requirements for my main project, the Chandler repository [7][8][9] 
where I spend the bulk of my time.

Maybe someone among the 90% of people not yet using PyLucene is going to step 
forward and make some contribution improving on documentation, installation 
or otherwise ?

Andi..

[1] http://gcc.gnu.org/java
[2] http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/api/index.html
[3] http://svn.osafoundation.org/pylucene/trunk/README
[4] http://lucenebook.com/
[5] http://svn.osafoundation.org/pylucene/trunk/samples/LuceneInAction/
[6] http://pyicu.osafoundation.org
[7] http://svn.osafoundation.org/chandler/trunk/chandler/repository/
[8] http://svn.osafoundation.org/chandler/trunk/internal/chandlerdb/
[9] http://blogs.osafoundation.org/chandlerdb/